http://www.jewishworldreview.com -- CLEVELAND, AUG. 25 -- Maria Silaghi did not sleep last night. She scrubbed other
people's floors until after midnight. And then she lay in bed and agonized over whether her
10-year-old son, Anthony, might have to leave his Roman Catholic grammar school. . . .
-- New York Times

Maria Silaghi wasn't the only one. Just before the school year started, some 4,000 families in
Cleveland, with kids at 56 private or parochial schools, woke up to find that a federal judge
had just thrown out the state's program that gave poor families up to $2,500 a year to apply
toward tuition at the private or parochial school of their choice. It's an unwritten law: Bad
news always comes at the worst time.

Ms. Silaghi, a 34-year-old house cleaner, was distraught. "Please don't take this away from
us,'' she said. "My son needs this.'' Like so many moms, she wants her child to break out of
the poverty that has consigned her to a poor neighborhood and her boy to a poor school and
therefore a poor chance in life.

The judge's decision came as a shock to Jennifer Spurgeon, too. She has three little ones at
Our Lady of Mount Carmel school thanks to this voucher program. "This can't be true,'' she
kept saying. "It was like somebody stabbed me in the heart.''

Mrs. Spurgeon herself had just enrolled in a trade school, but might have to reconsider now
that money would be needed to keep the kids at Our Lady. The reaction of her husband
Daniel, who drives a delivery truck, was immediate: "I'll take two jobs.''

What's at work here is something that no amount of political or constitutional theory, no
social or educational theorizing, can substitute for: the complete devotion of mamas and
papas to their kids' future. Parental involvement, they used to call it at PTA meetings. It's an
intangible quality that has the most tangible of results, and it needs to be encouraged instead
of thwarted.

Remember when federal judges were the ones who broke the chains and gave children
sealed into their bad neighborhoods and inferior schools a way out? In the bad old days, the
whole power of a state, from Jim Crow laws to the National Guard, might be used to turn
some children away from the schools they wanted to attend. Who can forget the indelible
images of pigtailed little girls and bright-eyed little boys, dressed in their first-day-of-school
best, having to run a gantlet before making the schoolhouse door?

But now, not just in Cleveland but around the country, the federal courts are being asked to
kill a program that gives the children of poor families an opportunity for an equal education.

In the bad old days, parents who wanted their kids to have a better chance in life could and
did appeal to the Constitution, to the majesty of the law. (Yes, people actually used phrases
like that in those days.) Those parents prevailed largely because they appealed to the
conscience of the country. And who can look on what is happening in Cleveland and not be
moved? Something is wrong, terribly wrong, when the law is used to suppress people's
aspirations rather than support them.

Why would His Honor Solomon Oliver Jr. of Cleveland, Ohio, rule that school vouchers are
unconstitutional? Because parents like Maria Silaghi and Jennifer Spurgeon were given public
money to educate their children in schools of their choice, including parochial schools.
Therefore, concluded the judge, school vouchers have the "primary effect of advancing
religion.'' And that's the legal test for determining whether a program violates the First
Amendment's ban on government's establishing a religion.

Some of us had thought that the primary effect of school vouchers was to advance a kid's
education and to let poor families do what wealthier ones can afford to do: send their kids to
the best school they can find.

Maybe not everyone can afford the Sidwell Friends school in Washington, but school
vouchers have let parents like Daniel and Jennifer Spurgeon afford Our Lady of Mount
Carmel for their kids. And, who knows, once parents like the Spurgeons can send their kids
elsewhere, the public school in their neighborhood might shape up. Competition has been
known to improve a lot of things. But those with a vested interest in keeping kids captive --
like teachers' unions -- seem determined to maintain their school monopoly via the courts.

If tax money were going directly to church schools, Judge Oliver would have a stronger
point. But these vouchers are going only to families too poor to afford private education, and
who believe with all too good reason that the public system has failed them. The primary
effect of school vouchers in their case may be to improve education, not support any
particular church.

School vouchers are the latest way to reach for the Jeffersonian dream of an aristocracy of
merit arising out of an equality of opportunity. They give families like the Spurgeons a little of
the leverage that richer families have when it comes to education.

When school vouchers are carefully limited to cases where the public schools are not
providing a decent education, they would seem a promising way to crack the educationists'
stranglehold on the poor.

Let's not pretend that it is simple to keep church and state separate in a society so permeated
by religious ideas and ideals, but it's important to keep them separate. Both church and state
have thrived in America because they have recognized their boundaries. Yet each has helped
the other flourish. Perhaps the key is to let the citizens themselves, the Maria Silaghis and
Jennifer Spurgeons, decide how best to assert their children's right to an education, perhaps
the most ignored of our civil rights today.

At least since the wilderness began teaching the first European settlers a new flexibility in the
face of new challenges, the genius of American politics has been a refusal to let rigid theory
stand in the way of practical innovation. School vouchers for the poor and isolated in our
educational system are only the latest such experiment, and they deserve a chance. So do all
those children. This time let's not turn them away from the schoolhouse
door.